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I think there was a similar case, but about the mother. The courts took her baby and she was on trial for kidnapping.
Eventually a geneticists saw it on the news and suggested she got tested again using DNA samples from other parts of her body and they found out she also was a chimera.
Some racism was involved as she was working class and black, so the courts were just looking for a reason to take her baby and throw her ass in jail..
Some racism was involved
Not surprised after reading the first paragraph
I remember that one, it was the first time I heard of this scenario. It really sucks for folks involved, but it is kind of interesting too.
Yes, it was the case of Lydia Fairchild
From Wikipedia
Fairchild stood accused of fraud by either claiming benefits for other people's children, or taking part in a surrogacy scam, and records of her prior births were put similarly in doubt. Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken away from her, believing them not to be hers. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered that an observer be present at the birth, ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild, and be available to testify. Two weeks later, DNA tests seemed to indicate that she was also not the mother of that child.
A breakthrough came when her defense attorney,[1] Alan Tindell, learned of Karen Keegan, a chimeric woman in Boston, and suggested a similar possibility for Fairchild and then introduced an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Keegan.[2][3] He realized that Fairchild's case might also be caused by chimerism. As in Keegan's case, DNA samples were taken from members of the extended family. The DNA of Fairchild's children matched that of Fairchild's mother to the extent expected of a grandmother. They also found that, although the DNA in Fairchild's skin and hair did not match her children's, the DNA from a cervical smear test did match. Fairchild was carrying two different sets of DNA, the defining characteristic of chimerism.
You'd think they'd change DNA test methodologies so this sort of thing doesn't happen again
It's rare enough for them not to give a fuck. especially since it'll only hurt poor people who cant afford a genetic consultant
Apparently this is more common with cats. If you see a cat with two different coat patterns, either divided down the middle or along the neck (as if they only had spare parts left at the cat factory), they may also be a chimera.
Half and half chimera is just the more unique variant, iirc, at least for humans. The more common type would just look splotchy if the different parts even happen to color differently. The patterns usually follow Blaschko's lines but don't have to.
There are also more basic forms where people will just have certain body parts with different DNA, like an extra blood type or other less consequential things.
Venus!!! I love Venus. She long predates AI for the curious. She's an ig celeb.
I saw this one too the other day on the other site, I think.
Half scraggle muffin, half had enough of your shit.
I wonder... is this more common in all animals that have average litter size >= 2? Or is there something else special to cats that explains this phenomenon?
In-utero growth rate + chromosome counts play a big role. I admit, ashamedly, that I have largely forgotten the reason they matter, but they do.
Source, trust me bro
"Source, trust me bro"
Seems legit to me. I trust you as an authoritative source on the subject.
There was a similar case of a woman who absorbed her twin brother in the womb. Only a small patch of cheek had her brothers DNA, but that is exactly where DNA is taken from when they want to take a DNA sample. This was discovered when she took a DNA test which came up as male.
Another fun-ish, kinda fucked up, weird story... There's a woman, Henrietta Lacks, who had a biopsy for her cervical cancer in January of 1951 before passing in October of that year. These cells were found to be incredibly resilient and quick to replicate. Most cells only lasted a few days before dying, but hers seemed to be functionally immortal under controlled lab conditions.
So, unbeknownst to her as consent wasnt required for such things at the time, her cancer cells were cultured and grown into large samples to be used in research. Those samples were split off and passed off to other labs. They've since spread around the entire world for a ton of research and commercial purposes.
They were used in the development of the polio vaccine, for example, as well as having been used in research on cancer (obviously), AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic materials, gene mapping, etc. They are used to test safety of cosmetics as well. Approximately 11,000 patents involve these specific cancer cells.
In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta's family to differentiate her cells from the others. This is the first time anyone in her family learned that her cells had been used in research at all, let alone that her cells were being cloned and used in research and commercial product development across the entire world. It became a legal issue after this, and after a couple decades of litigation, it made it to the Supreme Court of California where they ruled that "discarded biological materials" is no longer ones property and could be commercialized freely. They continue to occasionally fight against aspects of her cells' usage, and there are health privacy concerns for her family as well, but results have been mixed for them.
Henrietta the person died in 1951 at age 31, but her immortal cancer cells which still contain her full DNA sequence continue to live to this day, 75 years later. One source claims that as much as 50 million metric tons of tissue has been generated from these cells.
HeLa is extremely interesting, but still requires humans to cultivate her cells.
Canine transmissible venereal tumor however, is an immortal, contagious dog tumor from a dog thousands of years ago that evolved into its own lifeform - a sexually transmitted parasitic cancer - that has continued to this day to spread from host to host. Yet, genetically, it is still "dog".
Anyway, this is my answer when the job interviewer asks me about long-term goals.
I worked with HeLa cells as a molecular biology student. The ethics weren't a great look, and I'm happy that today there has to be informed consent for stuff like that.
Without having an immortalized cell line like this genetics would have taken even longer to get going tho, and she's actually one of the few people whose genes will be preserved for near eternity. Creepy, but it's closer to actual immortality than any of us will ever be.
In the 1970s, there was an incident where these cells contaminated other cell cultures, so the researchers needed DNA samples from the Henrietta's family to differentiate her cells from the others.
I don't understand. First, what was the point? I doubt there was a way to split the sample attacked by a cancer cells, they probably weren't going to recalibrate the transporter and untuvix them.
Second, weren't there thousands of the copies of the sample? Why wouldn't they compare it to one of them, instead of bothering the family?
That confused me as well. The stuff I read didn't elaborate on how that would help.
They detected allozymes (differences in proteins) by electrophoresis in the 1970's.
This could tell the difference between species and maybe if they were lucky large family groups. It wasn't as exact as using DNA.
That means every time that guy has masturbated in his life he was really jerking off his dead brother.
I'm pretty sure he was jacking himself off, powered by his brother's testosterone, and ejaculating brother jizz
Hey now his brother has never been more alive.
Can't even trust a brother you ate in utero
her eggs were cheating
Nah, his sperm was unfaithful
I think they are saying this dude is so cuck that he is raising his wife and non-existent brothers child.
The brothers ghost, after cucking him for revenge:
Ultimate cuck
As someone who has undergone extensive genetic testing, we're still in the dark ages of medicine. We basically know nothing at all about jack.
As someone with chronic issues, the amount of timed doctors just shrug and give up is kinda high.
Thats what I like House M.D. though, because it's basically a Sherlock show, there's always an answer. Unlike in real life, where they just send you home without actually figuring things out. I've had like 8 seizures in the last 10 years and still the best I've got it "idk, MRI seemed clear" and that's all.
The vast majority of what we do is just trying to get the body to a spot where it can manage the issue itself because we don't have the means to do it ourselves.
Personalized medicine is the frontier that everyone has been trying to break into since the race to decode the human genome. What a lot of people don't realize is that for every drug that goes to market there are thousands of promising candidates that are shelved due to a small population of adverse effects.
Now imagine what we can do if we can screen for those effects. Overnight the market would be flooded with powerful, effective medications with much fewer side effects. And that's just medical drugs.
Personalized medicine is going to be much more of a political problem than a technical one, at least in my country. We have a hard enough time screening for things like cancer and diabetes.
There was a woman who went to prison for this, her chimera baby's dna contradicted her story, I think to get public assistance of some kind, and the dna test convinced the state assholes she was lying and they sent her to prison, I think some researchers exonerated her eventually.
Are you thinking of Lydia Fairchild? In her case she wasn't sent to prison. However, her two children were taken from her and placed in foster care. Lawyers had refused to represent her at first, due to the belief that DNA evidence is too strong to fight. On the plus side, she became pregnant again. So a court officer was present during her third child's birth.
Despite being at the birth and witnessing blood draws from both mother and child, the court still claimed she was being untruthful somehow. Thankfully, that birth and its evidence were peculiar enough to attract a lawyer to finally represent her. Only after that did the investigation into potential chimerism arise.
More info here - https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-chimerism-2002
Might be I just heard it on a podcast, Poor Historians, Misadventures in Medical History, and I may have gotten the story wrong.
Why does this make DNA scary? I think it's awesome that our understanding of DNA makes us able to unravel things like this.
Imagine your dead twin using your penis to impregnate your wife with his DNA.
"You may have defeated me in the womb brother, but I impregnated your wife. I win."
The child is then born, gets to around 18 years old and challenges the father to a boxing match:
"Brother, it is me, beyond the grave! I have come to reclaim my rightful place in the world, and seek my vengeance!"
Yeah, I get it. Chimerism is scary, but not DNA
